Pixel Shader 3.0 will be introduced along with Vertex Shader 3.0 and this will happen as soon as DirectX 9 ships. As we said earlier, this is likely to happen in November, let's speculate sometime around Comdex Fall.

The bad thing for developers is that although this info will be available far in advance, there will be no hardware that will support either or both of these shaders. There won't be support for the shaders either in Radeon 9700 Pro or in the NV30 cards.